Decorous, yes?
I had a great time reading about Victorian seances. Nobody could be bothered with this stuff now. Victorian society is a hotbed of pastimes from an era before pissing your brief candle away on gentle pursuits had been truly mastered. Lost arts in their hundreds. All that remains is Backgammon and I bet no one remembers how to play it.
I must know what’s in that box!
It’s all outlined.
John clearly has the joy of cartooning. Look at those happy little ghosts!
Pepper’s Ghost – I’ve never heard of it. Thanks!! What a splendid DIY project just in time for Halloween.
https://www.instructables.com/Peppers-Ghost-Illusion-in-a-Small-Space/
I once was standing across the street from a furniture store and saw myself reflected in the mirror in their display window, but I could also see through myself to the wall behind me! It was basically an accidental Pepper’s Ghost; the mirror was not quite parallel to the store window so I was seeing my window reflection superimposed on the wall’s mirror reflection. Spent a while trying not to panic over being semitransparent until I figured it out.
Apparently they used a Pepper’s Ghost illusion of the late Queen during the Platinum Jubilee. No indications whether the entire Royal Family is in fact an optical illusion.
Maybe it’s an optional illusion. You can choose to believe it or not.
You’ve probably heard of it more than you realise.
Basically any time you see media huffing on about “holograms” being used in reality (“TUPAC ATTENDS GRAMMYS AS HOLOGRAM!!!”), it’s really always Pepper’s Ghost.
Yes. I think maybe 4% of the media mentions of “holograms” are actual holograms.
Don’t forget whist drives.
Maggie looks smashing in that getup. Also, I’m really loving the chemistry between Billie and Maggie in this strip.
Of course they’re besties. Who else understands what it’s like?
Va-va-voom!
Is Big Medium Energy better or worse than Medium Large Energy?
About the same as having large Small Medium energy
How about a Small Medium at Large?
I’ll have a venti.
But, is a modicum of medium really larger than a smidgen of small?
I think that was the plot of Gunnerkrigg Court a while ago.
I can’t decide if I want to date Maggie or be her.
Pepper’s ghost? I hope something unfortunate didn’t happen to Pepper since we saw him last.
It’s an old-timey optical illusion from the era of Victorian stagecraft. Basically, you point a projector at a piece of glass, and you get a ghostie. Think Haunted Mansion at Disneyland.
The sergeant is fine, thank you. He gets by with a little help from his friends.
Could you repeat that for the benefit of Mr Kite? He’s a bit deaf, you see.
What about his brother the physician, though?
I’m his brother the physician. You’re his brother the physician. He’s his brother the physician. She’s his brother the physician. Wouldn’t you like to be his brother the physician, too?
Isn’t he getting on a bit, though? It was twenty years ago that he taught the band to play, back in the Sixties.
And yes, John, Lottie’s pup is getting up there in age by now, so it’s possible he’s no longer with us.
Maggie sure knows what she’s doing. At least for now. She and Billie really are a powerful pair. Also, Mrs Clovis’ bed looks really big and comfy… I wonder how many passionate stories that bed could tell.
None it will repeat if it knows what’s good for it
Do we know anything about Mr Clovis?
Did he die saving a previous Rev from a sea monster decades ago?
As far as I’m aware, Mr Clovis is still a total mystery.
He’s in the wind!
Better in the wind than under the potting shed.
He’ll be showing up for the seance.
Maybe he was the one who saved Penrose during the war.
Every panel is a masterpiece. I love what Maggie’s hair is doing in the second panel.
Fans of Victorian seances owe it to themselves to read Connie Willis’s To Say Nothing Of the Dog, the best and funniest time travel novel ever written.
How much would reading Three Men in a Boat first help? I’ve always wondered that.
I actually work in the travel industry, and it is my firm belief that no-one should be allowed to apply for a passport until he’s passed an exam on Three Men in a Boat. Weather, hotels, over packing – it’s as perfectly true of the neuroses Great British Tourist in 2023 as it was in 1890.
I never read Three Men, but I still LOVED To Say Nothing, and also immediately thought of it with this page.
Honestly, it wouldn’t make all that much difference. There’s a brief cameo in To Say Nothing from the three men and the dog (historically inaccurate, since the dog was invented for the novel and the trip itself was an amalgamation of a number of different trips), and that’s about it.
But both books are hilarious, so I encourage you to read them both anyway, in either order.
Wouldn’t that count as “fictional characters showing up in another author’s work”, rather than “historically inaccurate”?
J and his two friends actually existed, though Harris’s name was something else, and the versions of them in the book are fictionalized, so it’s kind of an edge case. Given that To Say Nothing is a time travel book rather than metafiction, I lean to “historically inaccurate”. But you could make a strong case for “fictional characters showing up in another author’s work,” sure.
Arguably it’d be more helpful to read a book or two of Dorothy L. Sayers’s. There’s a lot of references to Lord Peter Wimsey.
Helpful, maybe, but still not necessary.
I just read the strip commentary, and now I have to say, I’m suddenly very concerned with how I am pissing away my brief candle.
Piss, piss, brief candle! Life… is a piss pissed by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying pissing.
backgammon: Gammon Gambler on Commodore 64. Them was the days.
Backgammon is pretty enjoyable with a physical board too, though most of my fondness of it might be that it turns the traditional strategy game on its head, since instead of capturing or surrounding your opponents army, the goal that gets you the win is to have all your troops make it back to base and then make a tactical retreat off the field before the other side can.
Bit of an odd game where sometimes trying to delay your opponent by capturing a piece can put you at risk of a major setback yourself unless you’re careful to keep your own pieces safe in the process. Well, that said, I really only dabble, its my parents who play it regularly.
Slackware’s bsdgames package includes a terminal-mode backgammon game, which I play intermittently. I’d actually dusted it off a couple days ago because I was reminded of its existence elsewhere. It solves the biggest problem with physical backgammon — remembering where the pieces start. My siblings and I would usually just play acey-deucey instead to get around that.
Currently beating the computer 92-14. Its AI is not very good at assessing the actual balance of a game, which makes it vulnerable to bullying with the doubling cube and the occasional hilarious ownage on games where it happily cooperates on running the doubling up because it thinks it’s winning right up until it gets backgammoned.
It required an elaborate room-sized system of rollers, cranks, gears, paste and newspaper pages, but the Victorians did in fact have doomscrolling.
There had to have been some sort of macro-fiche before the invention of microfiche, right?
Yes indeed. It’s called a “book”.
Maggie’s dress leaves little to the imagination, but oh boy does it inspire plenty of imagination for what it leaves!
Hi,
my professor at University, Logie Barrow, wrote about this in the working-class (“Independent Spirits: Spiritualism and English Plebeians, 1850-1910”), very good reading.
Btw: Croquet came into being as a Victorian craze.
“How to be a Victorian” gives you some fascinating insights.
wait, didn’t he invent television a century ago
Who knew the unquiet dead could be so musical? It was all trumpets and tambourines at those seances! I blame the Sally Army.
Now there’s a funny coincidence, I only learned about Pepper’s Ghost myself just yesterday. I’ve been reading the new Cormoran Strike detective novel and it’s a big part of the plot.
Why is no one talking about the dog collage in panel #1?!
I can look up Pepper’s Ghost and all the rest of the fun games but I have no information on who any of those dogs are and why some are dressed up.
Is this in addition to the dog collage in the downstairs toilet (mentioned in ‘Christmas With Clovis’)
or has Mrs C moved it to a more prominent position?
Aren’t you reading the rest of the chat? Doesn’t To Say Nothing of the Dog mean anything to you? We are trying not to mention any dogs! (Oops, I blew it there, didn’t I?) 😉
I see she’s still wearing her socks. Practical *and* decorous.
Well hell, you’re right. I don’t remember how to play backgammon. I still have a game set, though. I managed to keep it for more than 40 years, through multiple moves.
By the pricking of my thumbs
99% of all ectoplasm ends up in paper tissues. So sad.